Eleutherios Ch. 01: Zeus

Author Note: This is the first part of a six-part story retelling the myth of the greek god Dionysus's birth and growth. It is told from six perspectives: those of the children of Kronos and Rhea (in order presented here: Zeus, Hestia, Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and Hera). In addition to being the story of Dionysus, it is also the story of the six storytellers. The six children of Rhea fought a war against the gods that came before them; here, they lay down their weapons and turn their attention to the future. What follows is a collection of attempts at characterizing the new era. This is not a pornographic text, though it deals with mature themes. I like to think I'm improving my craft, so any ratings and comments--even anonymous--are more than welcome. Thank you for reading this. I love you.

Content Warning: incest, parental abuse, grief.

1. Eleutherios Birthed

or, the Abdication of Zeus

When Semele died, I did not mourn alone. Hera mourned too. We held each other and cried. For weeks, when one of us thought of her, when one of us lacked her, the other was there, a mixture of sympathy and empathy. I expect this would surprise most of our human worshippers.

It should not. The wives of gods are crafty. My grandmother undid my grandfather, and my mother undid my father. My reign in the skies at Hera's side lasted an age; I find it baffling to this day that human stories would have me crossing my queen.

It was Hera, protector of unions and their results, who saved the unborn child of my union with Semele, whisking him from the incineration of his mother's body and pocketing him in my thigh. With that urgent task complete, Hera and I wept together, at length, over the demise of our lover. But we also recognized that Semele's obstinacy, which had culminated in her own tragic undoing, was not an insignificant factor in her charm. She was by far the most persistent of my suitors, and she had wooed Hera with the same intensity. When we finally bedded her, suppressing our divine forms and appearing as mortals, Semele had worn the smug smile of a victor.

She had chortled, while we cuddled afterward: "You may have fucked my aunt Europa, but now I've fucked you."

"Do you think this was her plan?" I asked Hera, when we were done crying.

"I believe she overestimated the faint traces of ichor in her veins," Hera said. Her tone was somber. "She was of your line, after all."

As the god of storms; I was storms, and my emotions and attention were no exception: they roamed the world, appearing in bursts here and there. I was horribly disorganized, and Hera was better at cataloguing our offspring. Semele had mentioned a grandmother named Elektra, but I had trouble keeping track of all the Elektras in the world. Hera reminded me of the Pleiad I'd bedded, and of the daughter she'd borne me, Harmonia. Harmonia, in turn, had borne Semele, a child of both ichor and blood.

Humans--those creatures formed from clay by the Titan Prometheus--are delightful, most of the time, but they can not safely look upon my form. Semele, full with my child and glowing with confidence, had ignored my warnings to this effect. In post-coital bliss, I had allowed her any one wish, having sworn to please her on the River Styx. She had asked to see me, the real me. I begged her to reconsider, but she would not.

The sight had turned her to ash.

"You blame yourself," Hera murmured, wrapping those strong arms around my slumping shoulders. "She would have died eventually, you know. They always do."

Time fell away as Semele's child grew within me. My thigh swelled, and I found my sexual appetite dimming. I was sick often. Lovesick, Hera insisted, but I had longed for many women without losing my ambrosia. Hera cared for me, as did other family. It was a good year for humans: dead Semele's mother and her siblings brought good rains, and rarely did my thunder accompany them. I remained in the halls of Oulympos. Good days brought discomfort; most brought pain.

"Is this what pregnancy is like?" I asked Hera.

She had given me so many children, rarely complaining, and she smiled silently at the question. The womb in my thigh throbbed; the baby, near ready to emerge, thrashed within. Hera simply caressed it, as I had her belly when she'd carried Ares. She laid her cheek on it.

"Your father," she whispered to the unborn child, "will always remember you, among his offspring, for he is not merely your father, but also your mother."

As god of unions, Hera's great joy--the thing that fulfilled her on a fundamental level--was to see others joined. This had always applied equally if not especially to me, and she had always loved to see me with other women. That pleasure was denied her in the year following our bedding of Semele. I simply did not have the hunger that usually possessed me, and my sister found recourse elsewhere--watching others, or using the toys fashioned for her by Daedalus.

I was not jealous, but I was envious. Semele's demise had not only deprived Hera of her great joy; it had robbed me, by proxy of the child incubating within my leg, of my own.

My thoughts returned, darkly and daily, to Semele's words. "Now I've fucked you." Had she schemed to put this child inside me? Had she known the pain of motherhood, and wished to smite me with it, as perceived recompense for my treatment of her aunt? Perhaps Semele, growing up among her father's people, had believed their stories: that I was uncontrollable in my lust, that I abducted and raped all of my lovers. This simply can't be true. Hera would have had me poisoned or castrated. We merely mate freely, unshackled by the primordial paranoias of Kronos and Ouranos. But the mortals in my temples fear or revere me, in turn, for my presumed seductive prowess, and Semele had been one of my priestesses.

As these fears grew, so too did the baby, of whom I desperately wanted to be free.

"You are free, dear," Hera suggested, one night. "You are father and mother both; sole tyrant of this child's destiny. Not even in the sky can you claim this independence." It was true. Everywhere I brought my storms, I felt the corpus of my grandfather Ouranos. He was impotent but still present, embodied in the sky, ubiquitous in the space above Gaia.

I decided to name the child Eleutherios, for freedom, though humans, learning of the limp with which I walked during the pregnancy, would later worship him as "Dionysos."

When it was time for the birth, I went once again to my sister. My leg ached unbelievably, and even Ares, whose cramps upon his release from the giants' jar were legendary, took pity on me. With every Olympian save Poseidon in attendance, I announced my new child's name and prayed to my mother Rhea for a safe delivery. Hera put her hand on my leg, and smiled.

"It seems the wrath of Semele is incomplete," she said to me, whispering so none present could hear, a glint in her eye belying the mirth behind her concerned expression.

In agony I flared up, thunder and lightning, demanding a clearer diagnosis.

"I gave you a womb, to carry your son," she explained. "Now I must give you a vagina to bear him."

I nodded unthinkingly, already beside myself in the throes of labor. Hera traced her finger slowly down the length of my quadriceps, pausing just above my knee. With the deftness of a surgical incision, she caused there to blossom first labia, which unfurled as a flower opening with the arrival of Helios, and then a deeper rift appeared between them. A mess of ichor spilled forth, and, riding on its tide, a healthy baby fell into Hera's waiting hands, where it promptly began to cry. The wailing babe was passed around the Dodekatheon. Medical Apollon cut the umbilical cord. Fastidious Artemis bathed the babe. Hearth-bound Hestia warmed him; officious Demeter acknowledged his name; hospitable Hermes welcomed him into the world with the gift of a bunch of grapes. Finally, little Eleutherios was placed in my arms, and allowed to nurse the nectar from my bosom. My nipples chafed and bled, food for my new child.

Hera reclined next to me as the rest of our court dispersed to go about their business. She gazed at my leg.

"I believe I'll leave that there," she said, smiling more openly now.

The tender opening above my knee had, in divine fashion, recovered from the delivery. It was immaculate, and just asymmetrical enough that I could sense a smile on its lips, echoing Hera's.

"Why?" I asked.

"Perhaps childbearing has grown on you," she replied. "You do love making children."

I laughed, thunder clouds rolling harmlessly off the mountain top. It was true.

"You've already had both me and Demeter," Hera said, "and that silly Hestia is off-limits--perhaps it is time to see what life you could make with our brothers."

The thought had never occurred to me before, but curiosity took hold as I realized Hera was right. My potential mates for producing offspring had doubled. I was not eager to relive the months of pregnancy, but what were mere months on the scale of divine existence? The discomfort and pain and illness faded in significance as I looked down at the seemingly mortal baby on my chest. My heart flooded with love, and pride, and it seemed obvious, for a moment, that Eleutherios would not be the last child I'd bear.

Then the moment dissolved, my reverie interrupted by Hera's hands upon me.

"Hera!" I cried. "Not with Eleutherios here."

"Oh, but Zeus," she breathed. "Do you forget the night we conceived Hephaistos?"

I nodded slowly: I remembered well. Our first child, Ares, was only a few days old at the time. Hera was nursing him one night, and looking upon her had stirred something in me.

"You were something else," she teased, caressing my chest. "As you watched Ares at my breast, you became positively mad with lust." She ran a hand through my beard and kissed my earlobe. "It was a true manifestation of Zeus, exactly as feared by the people down below."

I had no argument left, and simply moaned into the peacock feathers tangled in Hera's braids as she pushed me back on the couch.

"Leto!" Hera called, hand covering my leg, "come tend to Eleutherios."

Our cousin Leto wordlessly appeared from some corner of Oulympos, veiled, and took the newborn from my arms.

Even with her veil, I could sense the smoldering scorn in the gaze she afforded Eleutherios. Her eyes wandered to my crotch, and I understood. Leto had borne Apollon, the greatest of us. At Eleutherios's age, minutes-old Apollon was already stringing his bow and mastering the lyre. The human blood in Eleutherios wouldn't allow for such instant greatness. Leto lingered, rocking Eleutherios in her arms as her ancient eyes bore holes through both her veil and my loincloth.

Hera dismissed her, not impatiently, but in a liberating manner--Leto was free to go--and she took her leave.

"What's our wife's problem?" Hera asked, when we were alone.

Our wife. We had many, but Leto was one of our dearest. So doted upon by Hera had she been in those early days that she had to flee Oulympos entirely to give birth to Apollon and Artemis in peace. Pursued from land to land by an admittedly overbearing Hera, she had eventually found refuge with her own sister Asteria, god of oneiric prophecy.

I laughed, in part at the memory of Hera sulking in the halls of Oulympos, wondering why Leto wouldn't let her be midwife to the twins, in part at what I divined Leto's problem to be.

"She doesn't understand why I waste my time with mortals," I explained, "when I could be making more Apollons with her instead."

"Who's to say Eleutherios will be any less than Apollon?" Hera huffed. "She just wants cock. I say let her have it."

I was all for letting Leto have cock, but my mind was already drifting further from such things. In the days after Eleutherios's birth, I found my thoughts increasingly drawn to Hera's comment about childbearing.

During the daytime, I fantasized about wild Poseidon and unreachable Haides, of crafty Hephaistos and petulant Ares and rakish Hermes and--most of all--perfect Apollon. If I'd made Apollon with Leto, who might I make with Apollon?

But my hand was stayed; at night, Asteria plagued me with visions unbidden: the mighty sky reduced to a foul cave, and myself a pale Ekhidna bound therein, forever mating and belching forth monstrosities from the recesses of my thigh.

"You are not sleeping, love." Hera was concerned.

"No," I admitted. "I fear the fate of our grandmother."

"That is a fear most women carry," Hera said, not unsympathetically. "We make our children, but we don't always mold them. Sometimes they are undone by monsters. Sometimes they become monsters. Ares teeters on the precipice, you know."

"I know." I hadn't known, really, but it made sense.

"I worry for him, and through that worry, I worry for myself. Gaia's crime was her children; perhaps Ares will be mine."

I held Hera and nodded.

I was so caught up in my nightmares that I did not immediately understand what should have been clear: I was already a mother. I did not need to mate with my brothers and sons and nephews in order to experience the anguish of Gaia--or Rhea, or Ekhidna, or any of the other mother-gods whose children had been rejected by the world. Even if I refused to mate ever again, that dread possibility existed in Eleutherios. He could become my crime, as Hera feared of Ares, and perhaps Apollon or some other better god down the line would push Eleutherios back into my womb and lock me in a pit.

When I did finally piece this puzzle together, several sleepless weeks later, it seemed to me that there were only two surefire paths to avoid the worst outcomes Asteria's nightmares presented. The first, impossible path--the path of my father Kronos and his father Ouranos--was to destroy Eleutherios before he could become a mark against me. I did not consider this path for even an instant, so I took the other.

I fled Oulympos, and I hid.